#what fucking train wreck of statistics

[azurdlywisterious]

Okay okay okay I have a good feeling about this time!

0 notes ⤴️ 🔁 ❤️

📻 not-another-guy-podcasting reblogged thecoolerscrewdriver

👄 thecoolerscrewdriver

If ur getting stalked by a “legendary” scorchbeast, ur best bet at getting out of that alive is chugging some nukashine and praying that it’ll be kinder to u then whatever sick supernatural force sent u a literal dragon to slay while overwmcumbered

👄 thecoolerscrewdriver

Why the fuck did I go to Grafton???

#bestie it was the nukashine #also have u found new razorgrain plants for the base?

3 notes ⤴️ 🔁 ❤️

⭐️ therealprimmshady reblogged big-mt-head

🧠 big-mt-head

⭐️ therealprimmshady

Sir what is this?

🧠 big-mt-head

I’m conducting research

#a day in life of a science deputy

174,390 notes ⤴️ 🔁 ❤️

💸 mrhouseownsmysoul reblogged uh-ohthemisery-2

💸 mrhouseownsmysoul

Still running from your problems Dalcia?

🏃‍♀️ uh-ohthemisery-2

Still gatekeeping the strip, Suzie?

💸 mrhouseownsmysoul

The securitrons do that for me actually

🏃‍♀️ uh-ohthemisery-2

Really? Those things are so easy to hack

💸 mrhouseownsmysoul

Oh I know

#didn't have time to scrape up all those caps #there was revenge to be had 💅

73 notes ⤴️ 🔁 ❤️

🏃‍♀️ uh-ohthemisery-2 reblogged big-mt-head

⏳ start-startover

I hope Jason and the others are doing well…

💸 mrhouseownsmysoul

Wait, you knew Jason?

⏳ start-startover

You knew Jason???

💸 mrhouseownsmysoul

Mhm! Jason was one of the sweetest people I met out in the wastes. Helping his flock helped me find the strength I thought I had lost long ago

👄 thecoolerscrewdriver

Cringe

⏳ start-startover

Shut the fuck up we're bonding over a saint over here

💸 mrhouseownsmysoul

What did Jason mean to you, Deja?

⏳ start-startover

He was the man that saw the good in my heart that I myself was too blinded by guilt to see

📻 not-another-guy-podcasting

Cringe

💸 mrhouseownsmysoul

Who the fuck let you two in?!

🧠 big-mt-head

@.uh-ohthemisery-2 what does "cringe" mean here in this context?

🏃‍♀️ uh-ohthemisery-2

This post is a train wreck

#so queue better run run run

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🍀 luckiestbastard

You guys are getting screen time?

0 notes ⤴️ 🔁 ❤️

📻 not-another-guy-podcasting reblogged thecoolerscrewdriver

💎 fleshnbloodnshelfh8

how to be a good person?

💥 mygenderis-c4

my brother in christ if u have to ask tumblr you're just doomed

🏃‍♀️ uh-ohthemisery-2

Have you tried hunting legionaries for sport?

💎 fleshnbloodnshelfh8

Killing the paradise falls slavers did nothing. Even freed the slaves too

💥 mygenderis-c4

Oof. Not even for freeing them? What did you even do?

💎 fleshnbloodnshelfh8

Blew up a town

💥 mygenderis-c4

What

🏃‍♀️ uh-ohthemisery-2

What

🍀 luckiestbastard

On accident, right?

💎 fleshnbloodnshelfh8

Well...

🍀 luckiestbastard

Right???

💎 fleshnbloodnshelfh8

About that.

📝 mrrocherwasmytather

If it isn't the kid that blew up the sweet little town of Megaton! Great story, by the way.

🏃‍♀️ uh-ohthemisery-2

What the fuck???

#wow this guy’s a piece of work #<prev the guy that blew up the town? #prev #nah the reporter

1,842 notes ⤴️ 🔁 ❤️

🌌 azurdlywisterious

Oh, there you are danny

[lunar-fey]

finally maybe going to play dnd w skerples tomorrow probably so i was double checking my character sheet. oh buddy

oh boy. this will be. a challenge!

[thebibliosphere]

Allow me to start by saying, I’m not mad at anyone for not realizing this and I’m not criticizing you for not thinking about it (because why would you? this is not your norm), but I feel like a lot of people not understanding why I can’t do things like home physical therapy visits at the moment, don’t truly understand what it means to be dangerously immunocompromised during a time of pandemic, and just how strict self-isolation measures have to be for some of us, and the level of isolation we live with year-round because of our illnesses.

I am a sick person, this is news to exactly no one unless you are very very new to my blog, in which case, hi sorry the funny post you followed me for is tied to this train wreck. I live most of my life in isolation because of my illnesses, and I’ve had over five near-death experiences in as many years, but last year I nearly lost the fight for good. I have spent the entire last year recovering, slowly regaining strength, slowly managing to stabilize and regain some small quality of life. Slowly, so very slowly, because the toll of nearly dying is not something you bounce back from quickly, physically or mentally. 

That alone would make me a high-risk patient for something like COVID-19, but on top of that, I also have a condition (MCAS) where my body overreacts to infections to such a point where my own immune response can send me into anaphylaxis, among other things. You know that whole “cytokine storm” everyone’s talking so much about but hardly seems to understand but is absolutely scared shitless of? My body does that all by itself. *jazz hands of despair*

So just to recap: as an immunocompromised individual, I am more likely to get the virus, but also because of my MCAS, I’m more likely to die from complications because my immune system is a sack of rabid weasels fighting in a trenchcoat. This does not even include the complications from a condition like EDS, where I am more prone to lung collapse and heart valve prolapses if I get something like COVID-19 or y’know, flu. (Please get your yearly flu shots and practice good hand washing protocol year-round regardless of global pandemic status, please I am begging you.)

This is why several weeks before the pandemic was officially declared, my health care team decided “yea, you should probably stop going outside unless it’s an emergency” and canceled all my nonvital care, which regrettably includes all the things I do to manage my pain i.e. weekly massage and physical therapy. The risk was just deemed too high. 

The week pandemic was declared, the message turned into “everyone you live with either needs to self isolate with you or leave, don’t interact with anyone unless it’s a medical emergency or part of your vital care”, vital being “a thing which keeps you alive”. And just to give you an idea of how strict this measure is: the testing for the condition which sends me into random anaphylaxis has been indefinitely postponed and declared an elective. *despairing jazz hands intensifies*

So no, I can’t have home care for physical therapy right now, because no one apart from my husband is allowed in or out of our house. I am not just being stubborn or dramatic. I am not shooting down your seemingly sensible suggestions because I am being contrary and difficult like someone implied in my inbox (and okay yea I am mad at that one person and they can fuck off). I am trying to protect myself as best I can because I’m acutely aware that others won’t. I’m aware of all the people complaining and breaking self-isolation rules because they’re bored. I’m aware of all the people who keep saying things like “but we need to get the economy going”. I am aware that for many people, I am an acceptable statistic. I am aware my life is more than likely forfeit if I get sick and it’s a choice between me and someone else. I’m aware, I’m so horribly aware all the time and on top of that I’m in so much pain sometimes all I want to do is lay down and cry, Sometimes it’s all I can do.

And sometimes I just want to bitch about it without people trying to offer “obvious” solutions, who don’t know the full scope and reality of what this life is like. And I would appreciate if people respected my knowledge of myself enough to listen to me when I say something isn’t an emergency and not imply I’m not taking care of myself, because friend, you have got no God damn idea the lengths I go to to stay alive every day. And I’m not the only one living in this perpetual nightmare day in day out, regardless of pandemic. I’m just the one with a platform big enough to be heard.

Please, be kinder, and think before you offer what seems like an “obvious” solution. If it’s obvious and we’re not doing it, there’s an obvious answer as to why. You don’t need to know that answer in order to know it’s valid. You just need to respect that it exists. 

I know the desire to help is there, and I applaud that desire, but ask yourself, is the person asking for help? Have they requested feedback? If yes, respond accordingly. If not, offer sympathy and kind words instead. If you’re not sure here’s a magic phrase that will serve you well for most situations like this:

“Do you want help or do you need to just vent and let it out? I’m here either way.”

[violetnotez]

Class 1-A During Quarantine

This is just pure crack because I’m really hating social distancing rn

———————————

Alrightie so just imagine UA getting shut down and all of Class 1-A has to tolerate each other 24/7 non stop because their stuck together in the dorms

Idk if this would really happen or they would just be sent home but JUST IMAGINE KAY

All hell breaks loose at the news-

Some (Mina, Uraraka, Kirishima) are trying to optimistic about the whole thing (“At least we won’t be getting sick!” “It’ll be fun to hang out more and get to know each other better!”)

Some take it a little harder

Bakugo is flipping is SHIT because there is no way he is going to be around all these extras for who knows how long

There are two types of freak outs at the news that school is going to be having a slight break for a while-

All of Dekusquad is practically sobbing- no school?!? Will we get set back?!? What about hero training!!?

Immediately starts planning study and training sessions

All of Bakusquad is FLIPPING THEIR SHIT-NO SCHOOL HECK YEAH

Kaminari, Kirishima, and Mina are just pumping their fists in their air and screaming “YEAH!”

But they get SOOOOOO depressed when Aizawa says they’d have to do video lessons and that school would still be in session-at some point

Shoto really thinks this is all a hoax and has crazy conspiracy theories concocted about the whole thing

Will tell everyone and anyone who will listen

He will sit in his room surrounded by papers and his laptop on full brightness in the dark as he tracks the stats and pieces his theory together

Tsuyu and Uraraka takes this SOOO seriously

Sweet babies don’t wanna get sick!

Washes their hands, socially distances themselves

If you run out of any type of essentials-soap,tissues, etc-they got you covered tho they are more than happy to share

Iida takes it WAY TOO GODDAMN SERIOSULY

You would think he’s preparing for World War 3

He tries to ration out crap that really doesn’t need to be

What a shocker when you go to the bathroom and see that each individual square of toilet paper is stacked up near the toilet and not on the roll

The adjacent “Take only a few!” Sign makes you roll your eyes big time

Pretty much everyone in Class 1-A ignores Iidas annoying preaching about “social disntancing” and “washing your hands” and look to Momo for help

She is very educated about the whole thing and researches her crap all the time, giving everyone accurate tips and statistics about the disease

Kinda of the mama bear through all of it-also completely open to sharing, or if your feeling kinda anxious about the situation she is happy to sit and talk with you to ease your mind

Kirishima as well-he is a big softie and would do anything for his friends! If your feeling scared, this rock boy has got you!!! He’ll try his best to make you feel better

Kaminari and Sero are the biggest crackheads-they don’t see this as a pandemic but as an excuse to turn into hermits and play videogames all day

Their sleep schedules are JACKED

You once found Kamianri eating “dinner” at 5 o’clock in the morning

Honestly scared for those two-itll be past midnight and their rooms will be completely dark except for the lights of the TV screen coming from cracks under their doors and loud gun noises

Sato makes BOMB food though- all of the Class is eating nice and proper because of him

Also takes extra special measures to make sure he doesn’t spread any germs, so it���s honestly safer than regular food

Jiro is jamming to music the whole time-she is not saying hi to anyone, if you wanna say hi to her that’s chill, but she’s is not coming out of her room

Toru swears on her FUCKING LIFE she is going to die-but honestly nobody can see her and accidentally touch her so she’s okay, but she overrracts BIG TIME

Everyone knows where she is at because there is always a floating can of Lysol

Oh my god keep your doors locked because Mineta is going to use this time to try out every nasty perverted trick in the book

He’s lonely and horny what do u expect

Will sneak into rooms, try and set up cameras-really wierd stuff

Even Kaminari told him to chill out because his plans were getting kinda nasty

Bakugo-ohhh this BOI IS FUMING

Will wanna kick Corona in the face

He is SICK of everyone talking about it

His freak outs are hilarious- “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERES NO TOILET PAPER?!? WHY THE HELL IS EVERYONE WANTING TOILET PAPER?!? IF U RUN OUT JUST USE GODDAMN PAPER TOWELS!!!!”

Bakugo calm your tits

Izuku is the smartest one about it-uses his time to study, prepare for future exams, and keep his body in tip top shape

Calls his Mom like every other day along with Shoto and Kirishima

The ones getting calls from their families is Bakugo and Kaminari

Everyone knows Bakugo is on the phone with his mother is when he starts screaming “Old hag!” And yelling a lot more

Kaminari gets kinda embarrassed because his family always wants to FaceTime and everytime a girl enters the screen they flip their shit and start asking really loudly if their dating

Pray for Aizawa tho

His nerves are gonna be wrecked because he’s gonna be so worried about the class

He knows exactly which kids are gonna freak out about it so he makes sure to always drop by and tell the class that if they needed to talk he was more than willing to listen

Oh but the moment Skyping lessons becomes a thing-he is going to literally wanna rip his hair out the chaotic mess that is his class is going to destroy his patience

———————————-

Hope this made some of you guys feel a little better and pls-STAY SAFE AND HEALTHY!!! ☺️

(RULES | MASTERLIST| REQUESTS CLOSED)

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

democracy was on the ballot and it won

I am a slow-boring-of-hard-boards realist about politics. I am delightedly surprised when I get what I want AT ALL. Months and months ago, I said that my number one issue in this election was the desperate need to put the brakes on democratic backsliding in the United States. I’m not sure how to process the fact that I’ve started to get what I wanted even before the transition.

There is a real path forward for democracy reform in this country. EVEN WITH an aspiring autocrat doing everything he could to rig this election, EVEN WITH a pandemic raging, EVEN WITH malicious foreign actors still trying cause problems, EVEN THOUGH we still have not restored the Voting Rights Act, EVEN WITH all the structural imbalances built into our creaky eighteenth-century constitutional system:

Voter participation went way up! People voted over the course of several weeks from the comfort of their own homes, or on weekends, or on Election Day. And because people took responsibility and spread out their votes like that, it was safer to go to polling places. That was a huge collective choice to prevent a lot of suffering and even some deaths.

A big part of why they could do that is the enormous number of citizens who rallied to work at the polls so that the retirees who usually do the job could sit this year out.

Cities and states around the country took the time they need to count carefully.

Media gatekeepers, for the most part, had the discipline and the patience to be helpful to users about what we knew and what we didn’t. If anything, they’re erring on the side of being too cautious. This is after weeks of most media gatekeepers having the discipline to debunk a disinformation campaign by Trump’s allies and Russian backers, instead of aggressively participating in it.

Social media companies took the most aggressive countermeasures yet against election misinformation.

The person who got the most votes is also the person who won the election, which is pretty cool!

That is a huge improvement from EVERY PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Just in terms of how well the election itself was administered, my only major criticism is that we still did not do something called risk-limiting audits. In the case of an election, audits are basically a carefully calibrated statistical smell test. They’re not a recount. They are a reliable and cost-effective way of figuring out if a recount or some other type of scrutiny should be done for the sake of public confidence in the results – and that makes them a cost-effective deterrence against any bad actors who are considering sabotage. Audits are important whether an election goes your way or not, just like smoke detectors are important whether your building catches fire or not.

But that absolutely should not take away from the fact that we overcame all the new problems that were introduced this year and took some big steps toward solving a lot of old ones – despite the best efforts of Trump and all his enablers. Imagine what we could do under an administration that is helping democracy revitalization instead of aggressively hindering it.

The easiest way for us to make the most comprehensive change would be to win the Senate, which would allow a Biden administration to pass a revitalized Voting Rights Act and restore legitimacy to the federal courts. If you have any time or money to spare in the next few weeks, consider sharing it with the two excellent Democratic candidates in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

We should be realistic about the situation: we’re probably not going to get to do it the easy way, at least, not until after the midterms. But we’re not going to be doing it the hard way any more. The hard way is what we’re doing now. We’re about to get a Department of Justice that opposes civil rights violations and enforces what’s left of the current Voting Rights Act. The intelligence and military cybersecurity units are going to be able to work with the administration instead of around it. And we aren’t going to have to deal with a 24/7 fusillade of lies and voter intimidation coming from the Oval Office. To spin out the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” metaphor: we’ve been running a marathon uphill carrying forty-pound backpacks. We’ve reached the top where the path levels out, and someone just took our bags and gave us protein bars.

And while we have our protein bars, let’s look around, because the view is as clear and as beautiful as it’s going to get. Donald Trump had every intention of wrecking American democracy, and the entire Republican party had every intention of supporting his aspiring dictatorship. And, while Trump himself is and always has been a clown, the person occupying the Oval Office is the most powerful person on the planet. Actually, that’s an understatement. Since Truman gave the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our technology has grown stronger and our government has concentrated more and more power in the executive branch, which means that every holder of that office has arguably been the most powerful person in the history of the world. Every other holder of that office has at least wanted to think of himself as using that power for the advancement of democracy and humanity. Donald Trump affirmatively tried to use all that power to entrench himself there permanently.

We stopped him. We stopped him peacefully. We stopped him without further harming the many vulnerable people he holds hostage in a hundred different ways. We stopped him not by elevating an equal-but-opposite charismatic demagogue for a two-men-enter-one-man-leaves smackdown, but by building a vibrant, heterogenous coalition and finding competent, experienced, principled leaders who respect that coalition in all its raucous power. We stopped him, in short, by choosing to do democracy.

That feels good today and it’s enormously consequential. It is also proof of concept. It is something that can happen, because it has happened.

Something that political scientists and democracy advocates have been saying for the past few years is that Trump has been a propaganda gold mine for dictators. They use him as a cautionary tale against liberal democracy or even against hoping that things can ever get better: see, even the Americans are no better than we are! Dictators can artificially insulate themselves from accountability in the short term, which makes them ill-equipped to think about backfire. Train your people’s eyes on the aspiring American autocrat, and they can all see his humiliating fall.

To our sisters and brothers around the world, from Idlib to Hong Kong, from São Paolo to Moscow, and along every wide country road in between: this is the only true thing your oppressors have ever told you. We are no better than you are. We are no more suited for or entitled to liberation. Look what we have done. Imagine what you can do.

There’s kind of a false dichotomy going on where people swung from “Trump is going to successfully rig the election for himself” pessimism to “oh, Biden only ousted an incumbent by a freakishly large margin, it wasn’t an immediate electoral college landslide, why did Trump get so close.” This take has set in before deep blue California and New York have come close to completing their mail-in ballot counts, which tells you that it isn’t serious, but it’s also beside the point. Trump succeeded in making the election unfair. If he hadn’t illegitimately put a whole lot of thumbs on the scale in his favor, if we’d actually had the free and fair election we deserved, I think he probably would have lost in a landslide. We did the work and showed up in numbers that were ultimately too big to rig. That led to victory, although not a victory you can quantifiably measure against the dozen or so American elections that were more or less free and fair. That doesn’t mean the rigging didn’t happen or have any impact. It means we beat the spread. As the world’s most prominent train enthusiast once said, that is a big fucking deal.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the earth. One day soon, it may even exist. That is our charge. That is our choice.

So take a moment to recharge. Enjoy the view. Breathe. We got work to do.

[doublestandards2020]

I am beyond disgusted with what this country has became. First of all, Facebook and Twitter are the most communist organizations I have ever seen. Americans seem to enjoy it anymore, the communism. In regards to masks I often hear “well China wears them so we can” why the hell do you want to be anything like a communist country? Could you imagine leaving your communist country to get away from shit like that, then ending up stuck somewhere on the east or west coast here with strict mask mandates and you go out of business over communist like lockdowns? 

For those of you still functioning in denial that censorship is acceptable as long as its censoring what you specifically want, Poland is suing them over the censorship. Hmmm, a country that was censored and attacked by the Germans, is saying that it is wrong? Weird!

I never thought I would see something that resembles so much of the early Holocaust (keyword there is EARLY for those who are confused about the Holocaust and think it was only about killing Jewish people when it took years to get to that point, years of censorship and book burning Hitler did not start his first day off committing genocide, all it took was telling everyone the Jews were “sick” though) in my lifetime. 

So, while other countries are having MASS protests against lockdowns and masks, basically every country in Europe not really Scandanavia because masks are not “mandated” only required, Americans are over here fighting a non existent race war. Literally white people fighting white people for the most part. If you want to give and land back as “respirations” by the way, news flash, this IS ALL NATIVE AMERICAN LAND!!! I guess Natives just do not whine enough, nor do they have a giant mob of white people with them burning down black owned businesses in their protests, you do not even hear about them because they actually protest peacefully. Or maybe people just do not give a shit because only 1% of the population is even over 5% Native American that is including every relative in my family since half of my family is full Native American. I am talking actually registered with a tribe, not claiming to be 1/64th Cherokee. So if you want to go there with the “African Americans are shot more based on their population” actually no, Natives are. If 1 Native American is shot a year by police (which there is always more than that they are so unimportant they are lumped into an “other” category) I live in a state where nothing but white people were shot 2 years in a row by police. My little brother got in a car wreck, has a pulse for 40 minutes, was only 15 miles away from the hospital and the police never took him to the hospital they just waited for his pulse to stop then threw his warm body in a body bag. How is that any better than what they did to Floyd, no they did not shoot either one of them but both lives could have been saved. 

This morning I saw a man murdered his own mother and father, and a cop trying to save them, where is the outrage over things like that? Where is the outrage about the little girl playing in her yard who was shot by a black man simply since she was white? Where is the outrage for the woman who was shot point black in the head for saying “all lives matter” they did not even attempt to catch her killer. There has not been 1 update on that since summer 2020. Where is the outrage over the multiple black people, including a child, who were killed in the “no cop” zone in Seattle last summer? Why are they pursuing the capitol rioters as if they are serial killers, for taking selfies in the capitol while Minneapolis and Portland (I live in Oregon by the way I have seen Portland first hand) look like a third world country? Why does the cop who shot a capitol rioter, not even have to face trial? Seems to me people are 100% ok with murder, as long as it fits their race/political agenda. They base whether or not they are ok with murder on race and/or political affiliation. 

Back to Scandinavia real quick, who has way better healthcare and a much longer life expectancy than USA by the way, they are recommending pregnant or breastfeeding women wait to take the experimental elixir still in trials until 2023. USA is over here shoving it down pregnant womens throat just like they do every jab. Its ridiculous. NOT every scientist agrees with this, just your little handful of pre selected elite the news shows does. Even Australia is making fun of us and they are quite the shitshow of their own. When other countrys’ news stations are being more honest than our own we really are not doing well as a nation.

Now back to the mask bullshit... how do you people function ignoring the fact that OVER 10 STATES HAD NO MASK MANDATES AND EVERYTHING WAS OPEN ALL YEAR! Are you that reliant on mainstream media you can not simply google, the statistics and mandates of other states? And see that states with no mask laws that have been fully open have no higher number, all the states that are constantly having the highest infected population and deaths are mask mandated democratic ran states. Dear lord... its like the huge majority of people who live in Democrat ran states start their day with CNN and NBC, and refuse to believe anything unless it comes out of Faucis mouth. Also very sick of hearing “where is your degree” when Bill fucking Gates has absolutely no medical training at all and is the “worlds best doctor” according to google. Its nauseating how delusional people are.

I am actually OSHA certified too I worked in a construction office for several years. According to OSHAs own handbook, anything smaller than 50 microns in size you need a fitted respirator for. Otherwise its useless. Men had to shave their beards for jobs where a “mask” was required with particles smaller than 50 microns to ensure it fit

For the record I don’t give a shit if you want to wear a muzzle, outside, in your car, whatever, put it on your small child (that one really gets me they even have to wear them outside for sports in Oregon) or inject yourself and your child with a jab still in trials until 2023, until you start demanding I do too. If your mask and jab work, don't worry about other people! You must not have very much faith in them. The same people who scream “my body my choice” about abortions are the same people demanding I wear a mask and take jabs not even approved. Even if it was approved, every single recall there is thousands, was once “safe and approved” by the FDA. People have way too much faith in these for profit organizations. 

[exhumcd]

STATISTICS —

NAME: Jason Peter Todd AGE: Twenty-nine. FACECLAIM: Lewis Tan. ALIAS:  Red Hood, Robin (formerly), Jason Wayne, Jay, and Jaybird. POWERS/SKILLS: FIREARMS — jason is one of the few members of the batman family who has no problems with the use of firearms. he’s a highly skilled marksman. he has perfect aim and took a journey around the world to learn from the masters on how to kill a target with different types of guns. ↳ PAIR OF M1911 PISTOLS — they fire normal bullets along with other types of ammo such as sedative injectors and anti-tank rounds. ↳ PAIR OF CUSTOMIZED JERICHO 941’S — these are fitted with extra serrations and mini red dot sights. ↳ OTHER GUNS — sniper rifles, rpg’s, etc. LAZARUS ENHANCEMENT —  due to being immersed in the lazarus pits, jason possesses some magical abilities. ↳ ALL-BLADES — pair of magical blades which can inflict great pain on magical creatures but are otherwise harmless. jason can summon the all-blades at will. EVERYTHING ELSE — master martial artist (trained by batman, nightwing, bronze tiger, lady shiva, all-caste), multilingualism (fluently speaks english, portuguese, mandarin, russian, asl, german, italian, french), flame dagger, surveillance, investigation, swordsmanship, genius level intellect, lip reading, peak human condition, was trained to be an ace pilot so he can fly helicopters, computer hacking, the ability to drive boats, acrobatics, thievery, stealth, tracking, criminology, disguise, escapology, intimidation, and having a built-in taser for his armored suit. ALLIANCE: The Outlaws, Batfam, and solo. THREAT LEVEL (OUT OF TEN): Nine. HISTORY FILE (LINK WIKI): Dossier I. Dossier II. NOTABLE CHANGES FROM 2012 TO THE TIMELINE THEY WERE PULLED FROM:  Jason trying to kill Tim for being his replacement? Didn’t happen. His anger was more directed toward himself for not being there to train his younger brother. He became protective more than anything else because he didn’t want what happened during his time as Robin also happening to Tim. Another thing, I tend to play Jason as suffering from mild hallucinations but they’re usually only triggered in very specific situations. He used to be on medication for it but since landing in New York he hasn’t been taking them. I also give Jason a German Shepherd named Darcy. He’s named after the character in Pride & Prejudice since that’s Jason’s favorite book. These are my only notable changes from the comics! LAST MEMORY BEFORE ENDING UP IN NYC, 2012: Alfred coming over to drop off groceries for the week at his apartment.

@rewrittenintro​

QUESTIONAIRE —

How are you feeling? Physically and mentally.

“I’m off my antipsychotic meds, which should tell you everything that you need to know about my mental state. I’m trying to manage since none of the doctors in this damn city will prescribe them to me.”

Where are you living? The same place you lived in 2012, or displaced to a random apartment? Explain to the best of your ability.

“The past four months have been rough but I’ve been sleeping in my safe house. It has all my gear displayed on the walls and a queen sized bed that’s more comfortable than the one in the apartment I woke up in. I didn’t trust that location so setting up a new safe house was necessary for making sure nobody can find me if I don’t want them to.”

What do YOU think we should do about the situation at hand? Try to go back home? The original mission of stopping Thanos? Rewrite the entire story?

“Why is anything involving Thanos my problem? The only thing I care about is finding my way back to Gotham.”

What will you DO about the situation at hand?

“I’m trying to find my dad. I’m tired of being alone so I don’t care about anything else. My family might piss me off sometimes but I miss them.”

Is there anything that you think needs to be done?

“Nobody ever likes my answer to this question. Do you really want to hear it?”

If need be, would you be willing to team up with the government and SHEILD to recoup and help the situation at hand?

“Fuck no.”

What are your worries?

“What happens when the timeline realizes some of us aren’t supposed to be here?”

What do you think are the pros about this situation?

“There’s only one that I can think of and that’s existing in a world where Joker doesn’t seem to be. It gives me short-lived peace until I remember the havoc the clown could be wrecking back in Gotham in my absence. Yet . . .  not hearing his laughter is nice even if it’s only for a little while.”

Anything else?

“Can I leave now?”

[addictedtostorytelling]

thoughts

a short fic-ish in honor of the twentieth anniversary of er episode 06x14 “all in the family,” which took place (within the universe of the show) on february 14th and 15th, 2000 and forever broke my heart.

canon. a recounting of the episode, mostly about lucy. not shippy, per se, though there is some mention of her relationship with carter, both the good and the bad. the pov is, uh, a take on second person. ~2,100 words.

here be angst and major character death cw.

how do i still have so many feelings about this fictional character going on twenty years and counting? rest in peace, baby girl. 

_________

do you ever think about how when she died, lucy knight was only twenty-five years old, certifiably an adult but unarguably a young one, in many ways still ostensibly a kid, just trying to carve out her place in the world?

if you think about how young she was---about how she still sometimes wore butterfly clips in her hair---then do you also think about how, even though she was young, she already knew that what she wanted to do with the rest of her life was to help people, to heal them? 

does it ever hit you how, just before she died, she had recently started to come into her own at the hospital---that for a year and half, she’d been the odd girl out, always struggling to catch her breath, but now she had finally begun to get the hang of things, to know herself and her job, and to form some connections? do you think about how she was going to graduate in june and become a psychiatrist? do you think about how good she might have been and about how many people she could have healed, had she a full lifetime (eighty years as opposed to just twenty-five) in which to work?

---and then does it occur to you that she never got the chance to be any of those things (a med school graduate, a psychiatrist, good at her work) before she was brutally stabbed by someone she’d spent all day advocating for? 

do you ever think about how lucy probably knew, from the moment paul sobriki pulled the knife out of her gut, that even if someone were by some miracle to find her before she bled out on the exam room floor, her injuries were too severe, and she was beyond saving? (that was how the speech they had taught her to say went, wasn’t it? “ms. knight, we’re so sorry. we worked very hard to save your daughter. we exhausted all of our capabilities, but despite our best efforts—”?) 

have you ever considered lucy’s simultaneous desperate hope and abject terror as she saw the light from the hallway pour into the room from where she was lying, helpless, in an ever-widening lake of her own blood? do you think about how she knew all the while that paul sobriki was still lurking and still armed? do you think about her pleading with the universe that maybe whoever had stepped into exam #3 could overpower sobriki and then find her in time to at least give her a fighting chance? do you think about how she probably also despaired that they might not notice the danger in the shadows until it was too late? do you think she was scared to death that her would-be savior might end up just like she had, in a broken heap on the ground? 

do you think about how lucy had to have realized before he even fell to the floor that this new person—this new victim—was carter? do you think about how she probably recognized his shoes as he bent down to pick up yoshi’s valentine off of the tile? or do you believe she could tell it was him right away, maybe by the way that he walked or how he breathed? (because, she supposed she could admit to herself now, the truth so much harder to resist as she pushed up against the brink of her consciousness, that she had always paid too much attention to carter, in one way or another, seeking his approval, his friendship, possibly even more—?) 

do you think about how she probably wanted to cry out in warning but couldn’t because her throat had been slashed? can you imagine what she felt like, watching sobriki charge out from the corner and hearing carter give that strangled yelp—“somebody!”—and then clatter onto the instrument table before falling astride from her under the bed? 

do you think about how, as she struggled to stay awake for just a few seconds longer, lucy probably wanted so badly to tell carter that she was sorry? (for all of it: for not being able to save him; for the fact that they were going to die together on a cold, linoleum floor; for how their last conversation had been a fight; for how now their last conversation would always be a fight; for the fear that she could, at that moment, as he rolled over to face her, see in his eyes, bright though the room were otherwise black?) 

do you think about how the last thing lucy heard before she faded out was him, stuttering out her name like a foxhole prayer through the darkness? 

do you think about how the next time lucy awakened, surfacing from beneath the deep waves of her heavy anesthesia, that momentarily she forgot what had happened to her? do you wonder if it were only as her nerves roused and a lacerating, sawed-down pain tore through her that she began to remember that she’d been stabbed—that she was dying? do you think that, briefly, she considered that she might already be dead—that this pain and this darkness perhaps signified the end?

do you think about how when she first opened her eyes, lucy was alone? do you think about how only after she started to stir—to try to speak (something stopped her throat); to try to move (everything hurt, as if she had been ripped in two)—did someone come over to her, not a stranger, but someone she didn’t know well—something, something—the surgical nurse—kit? do you think about how confused she must have been and about how much she must have wanted her mom then, unashamedly, like a child? 

can you imagine the horror of her conversation with elizabeth? can you imagine how the medical jargon, the thoracotomies and tracheotomies and splenectomies, which just that morning she would have found fascinating, suddenly made her sick to her stomach? do you suppose that she thought to herself this can’t be real, only she knew that it was real—and knew that, despite that litany of procedures that elizabeth had just rattled off to her, there was no stopping what was coming next, no matter how frightened she was? 

doesn’t it track that by that point in her medical training, lucy had probably seen enough lost causes to recognize herself as one? do you think, fleetingly, she remembered back to last spring, to those teenagers who’d gotten in a fiery car wreck on their way to the prom? do you suppose she thought about the burned boy, travis, who, as he had slowly and painfully succumbed to his injuries, had offered his parents an understatement on the phone in order to comfort them? do you think his words echoed in her ears: “i don’t think i’m gonna make it out to the lake this summer”? 

though she had been touched enough by his bravery back then, do you think she better understood, now that she was herself dying, how what he had done for them had also been a kind of mercy? a reprieve? a grace? 

do you think that’s why lucy asked elizabeth to plug her trach? do you think that’s why she whispered only gratitude with what little breath she had left to her? do you think she hoped that maybe in the days and weeks after she was gone that this final benediction (this gift) would allow elizabeth to sleep---would absolve any errant guilt, because of course elizabeth had done everything possible—they’d all done everything possible—and she knew as much, and she was thankful to them now in a way that just hours ago, before this nightmare had unfolded, she wouldn’t have been able to fully comprehend? 

do you think lucy understood that somehow the death they were helping her toward, the kind of death they were trying to offer, with this second’s pause to collect herself before the inevitable end, was also itself a gift (so much better than the cold floor where she would otherwise have perished)?

do you think, just as elizabeth rose to leave, that lucy may have actually felt an instant of peace before a sudden knot formed in her lungs, and breathing (even with the tube) became impossible? do you think that the differential diagnosis—pulmonary embolism—leaped into her mind before she could stop the thought? do you think she knew the statistics? do you think she knew that she was fucked before they even wheeled her to the scan? 

can you imagine what she was thinking as corday and romano allowed themselves to be overly optimistic about her chances with the filter? do you think she was aware enough to know that they were kidding themselves but experienced enough to realize that they had to kid themselves, because they needed the hope in order to do their jobs—because good doctors work on hope---because maybe, were she not about to die, she would have herself been a good doctor someday, too? 

do you think that was when the truth of everything really hit her—the reality, the senselessness, the fear—because even though she had already known that she was dying, now she was to the point where she was right up against the precipice, and though she was surrounded by many people in a crowded room, she suddenly felt more alone than she had ever felt before? 

do you suppose she thought, then, of carter, wondering if he was dying, as well, or already dead, because no one had told her what had happened to him or if he had even made it out of the exam room alive? 

do you suppose at that moment she yearned sharply for her mother and for her childhood bedroom? do you think she struggled and writhed and raged inside of herself, because, goddammit, she was just a kid, and she didn’t want to die, and she wasn’t ready—she wasn’t!—and she was going to do things and say things and be things—keep being someone—and she had plans!---but now everything that was her was going to cease, and she knew as much, and she felt scared, she felt so scared, scared of the blackness creeping up in her brain, of her synapses misfiring, as she could already feel them doing, her past and her present blurring together, until she wanted nothing more than to pull the blanket over her whole self to stay safe from the ravening beyond? 

do you think that in her swirl of memories she found herself in her grandparents’ kitchen, suddenly a toddler again, playing underneath the table, adult legs and adult voices towering above her? do you think all at once she snapped back to being twenty-five again and on a table, crying? do you think that’s why, when elizabeth explained the versed to her, she so adamantly refused—because she knew that the next time she went under, she would never surface again, and she wasn’t ready to say goodbye?

do you think that as she lied there, with romano making that tasteless (but also stubborn and human and hopeful) joke about how they’d put too much time and energy into her training to lose her, she had one final instant of consciousness and clarity? 

do you think that, in that instant, blood wet in her hair and tears salting her cheeks, she saw in her mind’s eye what might have been if she had only had more time---graduation, practicing medicine, finding her place and her purpose, falling in love, being happy, surrounding herself with family and friends and people who knew her---truly knew her? 

do you suppose she was thinking, just before the light in her eyes went out, how, in that moment, she wished she could tell them---corday and romano, kit and the other nurses, everyone in the er, carter if he were still alive---everything there was to know about her, everything that made her a person, just so someone would remember, so she would remain in some form present, if only for a little while longer?

can you hear her listing to herself the only vitals that mattered anymore: her hometown, her middle name, her first kiss, that even in her fourth year of medical school she still phoned her mother at least once a day (no matter how busy her schedule), that she had almost ranked emergency medicine over psychiatry on her match application, how grateful she was for everything, how much in this last second before the crash of the wave she missed and loved everyone and everything, all of it, just being---?

_________

he still thinks of her, of course, every valentine’s day, and whispers her name into the darkness like a foxhole prayer.

she would have been forty-five years old.

there are a lot of things she would have been.

[tessatechaitea]

Cerebus #13 (1979)

This cover reminds me of at least three different nights in college.

One time in college, a drunk friend of mine fell UP the stairs and injured himself. One time in college, a guy down the hall invited me to drink with him and he was telling me about all the dead cockroaches he found under his dresser when he suddenly just vomited all over the front of his shirt. One time in college, I snuck into the top level of a factory in Los Banos which was really just a bunch of creaky catwalks in the dark and I stole their fire extinguisher (I did not go to college in Los Banos. Do they even have a college?!). One time in college, a girl in my Steinbeck class told me all about this cartoon she was watching called Sailor Moon and I desperately fell in love with her (and I also started watching the cartoon and super fell in love with that). One time in college, my friend Soy Rakelson looked at me confused after leaving our Lit Theory class and he blurted out, "Why doesn't he just tell us what is true?!" One time in college, my teacher wrote on one of my homework assignments "Please speak up in class more!" because it was a humanities course focusing on American History, Art, and Literature and all the dolts who did speak up in class were business majors and idiots. One time in college, I...no, you know what. I'm not telling that story. Never mind. One time in college, I went with a friend to a meeting where they were starting a new fraternity and everybody who was starting it automatically was in but my friend just missed that cut off and when they held the vote, he didn't make the cut. He left hurt and angry and pleaded with me to stay after he left to maybe find out more information about why he didn't make it. When they asked me if I were interested in joining, I laughed and said, "Fuck that," and left. One time in college, I had to describe my Halloween costume to my creative writing teacher because she was blind (I was Alice Cooper in Wonderland). That same day in college, my Children's Lit professor just laughed when she saw me and said, "Great costume." I wish I had a picture of it. Basically I wore the Alice blue dress and smock deal and Alice Cooper's make-up while carrying the decapitated and bloody head of the white rabbit. One time in college, I got wasted on Long Island Iced Teas at the Portland Rose Festival with my thirty-something year old coworker and we wound up running around the deck of a battleship when one of the Navy guys invited us on. One time in college, I sat next to my lesbian professor of 19th Century American Literature at the movies where we laughed and joked the whole way through Demi Moore's The Scarlet Letter. One time in college, I read my version of a scene from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest in the style of Shakespeare and everybody after felt too intimidated to read theirs. Man, some of these stories are really sad! And I've purposefully left out the thousand or so stories that would have begun "One time in college during our Warhammer campaign...". Look, I really agonized about the punctuation at the end of that sentence but it wouldn't have been true to the punctuation's job performance to put all four periods within the quotes! I just realized I forgot to discuss the Aardvark Comments at the end of the last issue. It seems the expansion to two pages has stuck. The only part I remember was Dave Sim explaining that because of his nervous breakdown, he actually spent four days in a psyche ward. So I guess he went way past just shitting himself. Dave's Swords of Cerebus essay reveals one important fact: Necross the Mad was based on Exidor from Mork & Mindy. The issue begins with a bird shitting on Cerebus' snout. That's a portent I should use more often in my roller playing campaigns. Roller Playing Games should also have a simple rage statistic. Sort of like a saving throw but it gets harder and harder to save against every time some minor annoyance aggravates the player until they simply explode, becoming so careless from rage that it reflects in all of their dice roles. Or is that simply what going berserk is for Berserkers or Barbarians? Plus, there are so many Roller Playing Games, I'm sure one of them uses those rules in their system. Cerebus is captured by some farmers and taken to a Priest of Tarim to determine what sort of sorcerous monstrosity he is.

Cerebus pleads future violence.

The priest decides to dump Cerebus in the foyer of the castle of Necross the Mad, a sorcerer who has been plaguing the villagers of Lower Felda. His plan is that they'll simply kill each other and he won't have to deal with them anymore. Praise Tarim! Sometimes I wish I had become a priest but I don't think I would have made it through Divinity School. I'm fairly certain everybody would frown on my constantly yelling "Pshaw!" after every few passages from The Bible. I probably don't have to admit this because nobody was around to witness it but I just hopped up to turn on the light and then danced around humming the theme song from I Dream of Jeannie. One time in college, I went to see Ken Kesey speak after which he and his (new?) Merry Pranksters performed a sort of The Wizard of Oz play but about climate change. It was such a train wreck that halfway through, my friend Aaron Voorhees streaked across the stage. Or kind of duck waddled across the stage since he didn't take his pants off, he just dropped them around his ankles. The priest of Tarim has a lackey take Cerebus into the lair of Necross and it doesn't go too well.

Yikes. I'm more evil than this guy.

Sometimes I run outside in the morning to throw out garbage or something and I won't put my pants on. I figure it doesn't matter too much because I wear boxers and those are pretty much shorts. But today in the early morning hours, I was outside with my cat Gravy (on a leash) and I was up on the little hill in the backyard under the tree which enables me to see over all the backyard fences and two houses down, I caught sight of the woman there running back inside in her red panties. It was pretty awesome. I told that story because this guy's confession of looking down women's dresses reminded me of the moment and also because I wanted to tell people that I saw a woman in her underwear. This guy also confesses to having "impure thoughts about farm animals" which I totally have never done except in a rhetorical or theoretical or maybe even philosophical conversation. What I mean is I've never thought "I wonder what it would be like to fuck a goat?" but I have said to friends "You would probably fuck a goat, right?" Necross the Mad materializes so that he can speak with Cerebus (after disintegrating the guy who wants to fuck goats or sheep or chickens). Necross, being mad, decides to prove to Cerebus that he isn't mad. But his proof that he isn't mad is just more evidence that he is. That's what happens when you're mad; you're not the best advocate for yourself. Necross introduces Cerebus to Thrunk, a sixteen foot tall stone golem which Necross intends to bring to life at some point. That some point is soon and not in the way Necross intended because in a few pages, Necross is going to be killed and do an emergency transfer of his spirit into Thrunk.

Okay, less of an emergency transfer and more like an accident.

The priest's mob rushes into the tower where Thrunk begins to smash them all into jelly. While that's happening, Cerebus decides it's time to leave. As he wanders away to more sane territories, Necross the Mad realizes he's trapped in the only reinforced room of his tower. But if you think that's the end of Thrunk, you haven't read Church & State yet! Aardvark Comments just proves that a lot of people were discovering that Cerebus was one of the best comics on the market in 1979. Reading the Cerebus phone book in one sitting never allowed me to realize just how quickly this comic book finds itself and begins gaining momentum. It's truly inspired that Dave Sim, by issue thirteen, has created so many wonderful characters and written so many gags that stuck for decades inside my head. And I'm not a quote person at all! I'm more the type who thinks saying something new and unique and true to myself is dozens of times better than puking out some pop culture reference that everybody will recognize. Sure, I do it sometimes! But when I do, I do it all M. Night Shyamacock style! Cerebus #13 Rating: B+. I've given a lot of issues A grades so I thought I would change it up. This one is actually probably an A as well. I especially loved how Thrunk complains about the bottoms of his feet being sticky after stomping all of the farmers to death. We all how annoying that is, right?

[willow-salix]

Little random story that popped into my head tonight, especially for those who complained that we haven't had any EOS lately.

"Aurora, sister of Helios always announced his coming, leadinh the way across the heavens in her very own chariot, which she rode bravely across the vast horizon, both morning and night, before and after the sun-god. She was not just known for the rosy morn but also the twilight, for which she is often depicted as dwelling in the west. "

"Her abode was a magnificent structure, surrounded by flowery meadows and lush green lawns, where nymphs and other immortal beings frolicked, dancing as one, in and out, back and forth, whilst a sweet melody accompanied their graceful, gliding movements."

"Aurora was described by poets and bards as a beautiful maiden, with rosy cheeks and large wings, whose plumage displayed an ever-changing hue of colours. She wore a star on her forehead, carried a torch in her hand and was covered by the rich folds of her violet-tinged robes."

"She left her bed before the break of day, and harnessed her two beautiful horses, Lampetus and Phaethon, to her glorious chariot."

"With never ending cheerfulness she opens the gates of the heavens in order to herald the approach of her brother, the god of the day, whilst tender plants and flowers, nourished by the morning dew, lift their heads in welcome as she passes."

"Aurora first married the Titan, Astreaus, and their children were Heosphorus, the evening star and the four winds."

"Her second union was with Tithonus, son of Laomedon, the king of Troy. Tithonus wine her affection with his unrivalled beauty. Aurora, unhappy with the thought that they would be parted once he did as all humans do and died, begged Zeus to bestow upon her love the gift of immortality. Unfortunately, Zeus is a tricky god, one who often thinks only of himself and acts first, thinking second. You see, Aurora had neglected to add eternal youth to her request."

"The consequences of this were of course, only apparent in time when, inevitably, Tithonus grew old and decrepid, losing all his beauty that she had once admired. Aurora, unable to stand the sight of him, knowing what he had once been and why he had become thus, acted impulsively and locked him away in a chamber where he continued to waste away, until little was left of him but a voice weak and feeble, but an echo."

"It's told that, when he begged for release, begged to die, Aurora took pity on him and exerted her divine powers, changing him into a grasshopper, allowing him his freedom to continue his ceaseless chirpings all over the world. "

"Aurora, the goddess of the dawn, known to many as Eos, lived on and on, keeping constant watch, leading her brother and bringing with her the knowledge of each and every day. She is a constant presence, nothing is as sure as the fact that the sun will rise."

"Day after day, year after year, she is there. She is the dawn."

Selene reached up to place the book on the shelf above the little fold out bed that she and John were squashed up on, and turned to look at the mechanical eye that hung above her.

"I liked that story," EOS's little girl voice was soft, quiet so as not to disturb her creator, who had fallen asleep two stories before, his head pillowed on Selene's chest.

"I did too, stories are important, it's how we learn, it's how we pass down knowledge from one generation to the next. It's how we teach morals and how to be a good person, it's how we learn history and understand how the world works."

"Is that why you started reading us stories at night?"

Selene nodded. "That and it's the only way to get this one to actually stay still long enough to rest. Plus I thought you needed another side to your learning, John can bring the logic and the order, I will bring the chaos and the things you probably wouldn't think to ask."

Selene tightened her arm around her love and smiled at the little gold star she had stuck to the top of EOS's lense.

"Is the story why you gave me my star? Because that Eos wears one?"

Selene nodded. "Yep, that and you're special enough to deserve it."

"She is very like me, for I will continue to outlive those I believe I love, I will watch everyone grow old too."

Selene sighed, her fingers absently combing through John's hair as she thought about the AI's words.

"That's true in some ways, but not in others."

"Why is that?" the camera extended from her hub, like a child leaning forward to listen.

"Well, being able to care about someone isn't limited, you won't only care about a set number of people," she absently kissed the top of his head as she chose her words in the best way that EOS would understand. "Think of it this way, when they bring Jeff home, something I have absolutely no doubt in, then there will be another person in the family, and you and I being the newest ones will care about him too. Do you understand that?"

"I do, yes. At first I only cared about John, but then I watched his brothers, Kayo, Grandma and others and saw that he cared about them. I saw when he worried about them and over time I learnt to care about them too."

"Exactly right, baby girl. Families tend to be an ever growing thing, eventually, somewhere in time, there will be other partners coming and likely children being born and we'll all love them too."

"Statistically that is very likely, your logic is sound."

Selene smiled, wondering if EOS knew just how much like John she sometimes sounded, and if it was a conscious thought or purely accidental.

"Well that's where you come in, sweetie."

"It is?" her lights flickered, a sure sign, Selene had come to realise, that she was confused and struggling to understand a concept.

"It is. Because, as you just said, you won't age, not the way we do, so you have a very important job."

"Which is?"

"You have to watch over them all. You have to be there to help them, to guide them, to teach them. Just as you help John, you'll be there to help them. Watching over them just as Aurora watched over her family and the human race. Just as sure as the sun will always rise, you will be a constant in our lives and theirs. I think that's quite an important job, don't you?"

EOS paused, her lights cycling through two rotations before she answered.

"Yes. I believe it is important."

"Good."

They lapsed into silence for a little while, EOS probably off somewhere in the heart of Five checking on the monitoring station, while Selene took the time to really look at her love now that he was finally still and relaxed.

He looked tired, slightly slimmer and had dark circles under his eyes along with probably a day or two's worth of stubble on his usual smooth chin. She knew he'd been worried about their upcoming rescue mission, the biggest, most dangerous yet, but ultimately the most important one they had ever had to face, and the stress had obviously been taking its toll.

To say that she hadn't spent time worrying just as much would be a lie, she knew she would be a complete wreck the entire time they were gone too. There was never any guarantee that things would go as they should, there was always the threat of the Chaos Crew and the Hood hanging over their heads and this time would likely be no different.

The thought of losing any one of the boys, Kayo or Brains filled her with utter dread, but the idea of having to live even a single day without the man in her arms was too horrific to consider.

Her mind would be in overdrive imagining all the possible and impossible ways that things could fuck up and go wrong, especially as she would be stuck on earth and so far away.

Selene wouldn't be there, they had already discussed it. She had been asked to step in to help with a GDF enquiry after her work with Kayo. She had gone through a few months of training, extra background checks which, after Kayo's, barely scratched the surface, and had gone on a couple of jobs with Penelope to get a little more experience. Strangely, it seemed that when you were dressed as a crazy hippy people would either ignore you or they would spill their guts and tell you everything. Either way, it seemed to be a combination that worked. Honestly she was glad that she would be kept busy, it would give her less time to worry.

"EOS?" she kept her words almost a whisper, not wanting to wake him.

"Yes?" she was there instantly.

"Look after him for me? Look after them all. Monitor them the whole time, keep in constant contact and let me know everything that happens. I need to know."

"I will."

"Promise?"

"I promise, Selene. Even if you hadn't asked, I would do it. He is my creator, I'd never leave him alone."

[knybits]

A Murder of One

Chapter: 

15

Summary: 

A literal train wreck. Miyuki confesses, and Akiko’s eyes are blessed again. 

Previous Chapter | Origin | Next Chapter

Okay.

So pause scene.

Imagine this. 

A buff old man (we’ll say he’s old because he has white hair) suddenly snatches up you and your friends for an unexplainable reason. 

But your other friends that didn’t get snatched are being the absolute angels that they are and run down the old wack job to try and avenge you. 

And then your fiance since birth (different story) walks into the scene, and he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. 

Okay. 

Resume scene. 

“He’s kidnapping us!!” Akiko yells out, her face red with either anger or embarrassment she can’t tell. 

Tanjirou acts instantly, launching himself at Uzui with full intent on headbutting the hell out of him. But Uzui is too fast, and Akiko tries her best to kick the hems of her dress down to make sure she isn’t flashing anything. She kicks her feet wildly when she finds that the three of them are on the roof of the estate. 

“UZUI TENGEN YOU BETTER COVER MY ASS RIGHT NOW!!” 

“I am the ‘former shinobi’ Uzui Tengen-sama-” 

“DON’T IGNORE ME! AND DON’T ADD -SAMA TO YOUR NAME YOU CREEP!!” 

“Dear lord SHUT UP! Here, you brat, jeez!” Uzui brushes her skirt over, pauses, then gives Akiko’s butt a slap before laughing, claiming it to be rather flamboyant. 

Akiko nearly goes mental at the harassment, and Tanjirou looks like he’s about to shoot himself up to the roof and give Uzui more than just a headbutt. 

“You’re a pervert!” Kiyo yells from the ground. 

“Who do you think you’re mouthing off here!! I have superiority! I’m a pillar you jackasses!” 

“I don’t accept you as a pillar! Hmph!!” 

“DON’T YOU ‘HMPPH’ MEEE!! DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T ACCEPT ME?! YOU LOWLY BRAT!! IS YOUR BRAIN COMPLETELY DEAD!? I NEED A GIRL MEMBER ON THE MISSION, SO I’M BRINGING THEM ALONG!! I DON’T NEED KOCHOU’S PERMISSION IF THEY AREN’T TSUGUKO!” 

“Akiko-san can’t fight! She’s a member but she doesn’t have a uniform! She’s a doctor!” 

“Don’t need her then.” 

Akiko screams as she’s flung off the roof and she roughly lands in Tanjirou’s arms. Any other person would flush, but Akiko’s far too mad to even think about her cute situation. 

She shoves herself out of Tanjirou’s arms, jumping up and down and yelling at Uzui to come down from the roof so that she can deck him in the face. Kanon stares in bewilderment, wondering why Akiko is so prone to abandoning ‘Do no harm.’ 

Even Tanjirou doesn’t know what to do, staring at his fiance with wide eyes as she unleashes another side of her that he’s never seen before. Sure, she’s had her small temper tantrums when they were kids, but this is much more justified. 

“Shut up you nerd! I’m taking this one on my mission. She’s a hunter regardless.” 

Akiko can see the look of panic and fear on Aoi’s face, so she takes a few deep breaths to calm herself and approach the situation differently. She has no time to yell at Uzui, and despite the fact that he’s an adult, he acts like a child. 

“People have their own circumstances, Uzui. Let the girl go.” 

Uzui blinks owlishly at her sudden change in behavior, her eyes slanted up at him with long lashes barely brushing her cheeks. Mouth a fine line and her hair disheveled, but it makes Akiko look all the more dangerous. 

Tanjirou can smell the withheld fury from Akiko, and the fact that she’s harnessed enough control to reign her emotions back in frightens him. This anger is much more dangerous than her lashed out one, and everyone feels as if they’re seeing Akiko reach a new peak of anger. 

“We’ll go in Aoi’s stead!” Tanjirou interjects, just as Zenitsu and Inosuke hop onto the gates. 

They aren’t in any way injured, and she sees that Zenitsu killed three demons and Inosuke five. She can’t help but tilt her head in confusion at the new piece of information her mind is filled with, but Akiko can’t take that time to care as she watches Aoi rush into Kanao’s arms. 

Akiko quietly asks Kanon to make some lunch for the girls to calm everyone’s nerves, and Kanon nods her head in understanding before hurrying off. She then sighs, walking over to her dropped umbrella before picking it up, when she sees Tanjirou out of the corner of her eyes. 

“Are you okay Akiko? He dropped you rather harshly…” 

Akiko looks at Uzui, who waits impatiently outside the gates, before rolling her eyes at him. 

“I’ll live. It’s no big deal. I’m just afraid that the girls are mentally scarred or something along the lines… What? What’s wrong?” Tanjirou is staring at her, and Akiko can’t help but wonder why. 

He wakes up from his spaced out state, blushing a bit and kicking some rocks on the ground as he looks away. 

“Sorry it’s just.... You look really nice today!” 

Akiko can’t help but flush, immediately opening her parasol in front of herself to hide her face. Kiyo, Sumi and Naho giggle nearby, and Akiko nearly turns around to glare at them but she’s far too busy hiding herself. 

And as if some higher being grants Tanjirou with all the courage in the world, he pulls the umbrella down a bit to see her red face, smiling softly before saying, “It’d be a shame if I didn’t get to see my fiance’s face before I left.” 

Now Akiko can hear Kiyo, Sumi and Naho squeal with delight as her eyes widen and she’s nearly brought to tears with embarrassment. Tanjirou starts to laugh, finding that her red face compliments her amber eyes nicely, and he cups Akiko’s face into his hands before placing a soft kiss on her forehead. 

“I’ll be off!” He gives her one last smile, waving at Akiko and running out of the front gates. 

Akiko’s holding her forehead, staring off into space as her brain slowly but surely processes everything that’s just happened. And once everything loads in, her heart ascends. 

Akiko smiles.

---

“Himi Miyuki is on her way! Deep laceration on her lower left quadrant!” 

Akiko’s eyes snap open, her back aching from accidentally passing out on the wooden engawa. She quickly tries to rub the sleep from her eyes, stumbling to her room to change out of the light green dress she still dons. 

It’s only been a couple hours since Tanjirou’s departure, and she’s back to work. But what else is there to do? 

So Akiko yanks on another poet’s shirt, ties her hakama around her waist, and allows for Kiyo to help her with her robe and gloves. Sumi and Naho rush to gather towels upon seeing how severe the wound is. 

Shinobu stands by the entrance, waiting to welcome the house’s newest patient. Everyone is surprised to see Sanemi helping the injured girl up, and Shinobu decides to poke a little fun. 

Embarrassed, Sanemi leaves Miyuki in the hands of a more than capable lady to help fix her up, and she orders the girls to help drag Miyuki’s pale body to the table. 

Akiko’s eyes do a quick once over, and information she’s never picked up before flood her senses. 

Miyuki has just killed four demons before one caught her by surprise. She’s lost about 1200mL of blood, and Akiko orders the girls to elevate her legs once she’s on the table. Miyuki’s blood pressure is 90/70, and her breathing is so shallow it’s worrisome. Her heart beat per minute is 60, and her skin looks ashy and waxen. 

Akiko knows that Miyuki’s body temperature is naturally low, but that doesn’t mean she likes how Miyuki’s body is at a solid 90 degrees. 

So the girls are instructed to place a blanket over her feet and arms too, and Akiko cuts away the cloth surrounding the large gash. Aoi ties a mask around Akiko’s face, unrolls the sleeve of scalpels lined up in the bamboo sheet, and Akiko gets to work. 

Miyuki stays silent, dazed by the anesthesia, but still conscious. 

Akiko works diligently as always, hands moving swiftly to stop the bleed and making sure there isn’t any debris left in the wound. It’s a simple procedure, though trickier thanks to Miyuki’s naturally cold body. 

But once she’s done, Miyuki is able to form phrases and sentences, the anesthesia wearing off. 

“I wonder if Sanemi has ever been in love?” 

Not even a thank you… 

Miyuki flinches slightly under the glare Akiko casts her way, the scalpel glinting menacingly under the bright light, but Akiko throws her a bone, asking what she means. 

Their conversations dips into the topic of love in general, albeit Akiko is in no way an expert, but she entertains the idea with Miyuki. Shinobu, ever so quiet in the corner of the room, even steps in to offer her two piece on the subject. 

Aoi cleans the blood on the floor while Shinobu checks the IV of blood and medicine she finished making in her corner, and Miyuki finally throws her hands up into the air. 

“Well then fine! Maybe I do love Sanemi! Fuck whatever my step monster has to say!” 

Shinobu laughs, “What a surprise!” 

Akiko can see the lie. 

At any rate, she sighs, glancing at the clock in the room to take note of the time. She blinks owlishly at it as the date comes to mind. 

If she’s right, Genya should be coming in today. 

Akiko peels her gloves off her hands, removing her mask as well while the girls untie the robe off her from behind before she says, “Well, congrats on the realization, but I gotta go have my monthly appointment with-” 

Genya. 

He’s standing by the doorway. 

Sumi and Kiyo are right behind him, some newly washed rags in their hands before they step into the room again to keep cleaning the blood, and realization dawns on Akiko. 

“Uh, gotta go!” Akiko shoves a startled Genya out of the room and down the hall, quickly bombarding him with questions to try and make him forget about Miyuki’s feelings for his older brother. 

Genya is shoved into her office and she scrambles to find his documents. It’s an organized mess, and she knows that she should clean it up, but between 20 minute naps every hour or so and working for a whole 12 “shift” sometimes, it’s nearly impossible for her. 

Akiko sits Genya down on a chair, eyes brisking over his figure as statistics fill her mind. It’s overwhelming for her, and she shuts her eyes for a few seconds to clear her head. It continues to race with the adrenaline, and she starts to count her breathing to reign it back in. 

“What was that before? And are you- Are you okay?” Genya asks, blushing when she offers him a polite smile. Her usual business smile in the face of patients. 

“It was nothing important. No need to worry about me, either. You have a gash on your left arm so I see you haven’t been eating too many demons. Two in the last month?” Akiko flutters her eyes to clear it again, her mouth spewing words faster than she can properly think. 

Genya stares at her wide eyed, astonished. 

“Y- Yeah… How do you know?” 

She pays him no mind, scribbling the information down with creased brows. Genya isn’t all too used to this version of Akiko. Sure, she’s serious, but not with him. She makes no move to tease him, quickly jotting down information and asking Genya to confirm the information. 

Every time, she hits the nail on the coffin. It’s like she’s unraveling his life in the past month, and Genya is almost frightened of her. 

“Himejima hasn’t let up easily on you. Your biceps are 42 centimeters wide now… He still has you pushing that big rock, hm? Please tell him that misogi is not the proper way for you to rest your body,” Akiko sighs, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. 

She’s done with her checkup within a few minutes, taking no time to prod at his body and instead glancing at his limbs then writing numbers down. She then quickly stands to a small cabinet on her desk, pulling out a small roll of bandages and some alcohol and cotton balls. 

Akiko frowns at the little bit left in the jar, and the fact that she barely has any bandages left. It’s just enough to help patch Genya up with, but she’ll have to go out and buy some more in the local village after she’s done. 

“At any rate, I’m just going to wrap up your wound and then send you on your way. Sorry I was late for the appointment this month,” she’s about to unbutton Genya’s uniform for him, but he quickly stops her with raised hand and a mad blush. 

Akiko pauses, quickly apologizing for being so forward, and allows him to remove as much of his uniform as he is comfortable with so that she can clean his cut. 

Genya looks everywhere but Akiko. She knows that he's an embarrassed mess around any female, so she’s quick to finish up her work and allows him to shrug his uniform back on. 

“Do you want me to walk you to the entrance?” Akiko asks Genya, who shakes his head. She shrugs in compliance, apologizing for making him travel all the way to the Butterfly Estate for such a short checkup, and waves as he walk down the hall and out of the estate. 

Once he turns the corner, Akiko makes her way to the kitchen to find Kanon. The pinkette is looking through the pantry with a troubled look on her face. 

Akiko’s eyes are given a rest when she looks at Kanon, and it’s most likely because Kanon doesn’t kill demons for a living and lives a peaceful (or, as peaceful as it can get) life at the estate. 

“Are we out of food?” Akiko asks, and Kanon jumps at the sudden presence of the ginko eyed girl. 

Kanon nods her head and Akiko frowns, but the timing couldn’t be more perfect. 

“Alright, let’s go shopping together.” 

Of course, Shinobu feels against this idea considering the town is an hour walk away, and if they aren’t quick enough, it’ll be dark. 

“Perhaps someone else should go with you?” She says, and Akiko sighs. 

“I think we’ll be more than fine. If it make you feel any better, I’ll bring my tools. If Kanon trips over a rock, I’ll save her from bacteria.” 

Akiko can see the irritation radiate of Shinobu, so she quickly hikes up her bag, shoves a good amount of money in, and meets Kanon at the front door. 

Akiko doesn’t like the way Miruna circles above their heads. 

things are gonna get so spicy after this,,, fuck guys im so excited

expect akiko to grow!! we love character development :,,) also yeah she has other emotions besides ‘bitch’ and ‘smart ass’ :)) 

big thank you to @kny-writings and her oc himi miyuki!! 

[riverguns]

1 year 10 months 3 weeks 6 days

still clean and sober.

I've been scared the last week or so of this thing. Recently, it's been happening every day, multiple times a day. I sometimes start to create this scenario where, at the end, I'm nodding out and I feel better about everything. Not overwhelmed by the future or ashamed of what I've done. But that isn't the end. And I know what comes after that is a mountain of garbage, pain, nausea, more pain, and almost zero desire to live. So here we are. Still not using. Writing some bullshit on the internet to at least put it somewhere, rather than have it sit in my brain. Harmless enough, right?

In theory, I should make connections with people, have friends, talk to them, do stuff, etc. It's weird to ask for that. It seems extremely weak to ask for that. Also, who am I to ask for people's time? That's something we don't get back. Why do I deserve any of it? Also, if the statistics point to me eventually relapsing and dying of an overdose, why should I even bother having any connection with others? So because of all of that bullshit, my only social interactions recently have been work, telling my family "hi, how are you? I'm good, here's a meme" and a few instagram DMs. Clearly some garbage recovery going on here. I could opt to work on humility OR (I choose this option) open a dumb internet site and write some trash for no one to read that illustrates my being the worst fucking person on the planet with microscopic levels of humility and EXTREMELY LARGE levels of self centered thinking. Pathetic, isn't it?

The other sad part is, I do know what steps to take in order to get out of this and get back to normal. Why I'm not doing it is beyond me. Maybe a combination of fear and sheer laziness. See? Worst person ever. Hide, sulk, self pity, bullshit. But honestly, this will be fine with some time. As long as I keep putting off the starting to get high again part. Countless moments of "ok I'm done. I don't care if I die. No one else does either. I'm too scared. I'm too ugly and fat and stupid and will never be good at anything and waste my time training something that 6 year olds in various countries are better at..... etc." and then switching back to "but there are so many good things like trees, cats, connecting to people, staring at the floor. Maybe I could build a cool life. Maybe I can actually do this. I don't want to go back to living in hell and trying to claw my face off." It's like fucking ping pong. Like why not just shut the fuck up already? Why not just take action in one direction or the other? What's the point of this drama?

Ok now here's the childish vulnerable part. I feel sad and scared and lonely. I want a hug and to be reassured that I'm not vermin, I'm not going to be alone forever, and everything will be fine (and maybe even actually good!) But I'm going to have to improve everything regardless. And I can. So everything's fine. That's just where things are at. And hopefully the swelling in my wrist goes down soon. Then will just forget about all this and train handstands for 5 million years.

Maybe the point is to be able to deal regardless. Therefore dumb internet words. One last thing: people with a lot of clean time started using again. I don't want to do that. Scared. Maybe climate change will wreck life before that. Ok time to stop. Stupidity increased by 594 points.

[theotherjudas]

Death of a Prophet

When Thomas S. Monson died last week, I wasn’t surprised. The man was 90, for fuck’s sake. Even with all the premium healthcare I’m sure he’s received it couldn’t have been easy to keep that saggy bag of wind alive. But the death of the LDS prophet caused me to reflect briefly on my own experience of the man and his office. 

I was born during the reign of Ezra Taft Benson over the people of Brigham. For those keeping score, yes, I’m old. For those not, let it be understood that I was too young to remember Benson, or his death, OR the ordination of his successor, Howard W. Hunter, or *his* death nine short months later, OR the ordination of *his* successor, Gordon B. Hinckley. Outside of memorizing their names from the primary song, I have no recollection of these men, or their words, or their policies. I DO, of course, remember Gordon B. Hinckley. 

When I was a boy, I thought GBH was THE prophet. He looked the part: kindly, white-haired, soft-spoken, wielding his cane humorously to the loud acclaim of his followers. He projected a certain intelligence and charisma I felt appropriate to the mantle upon his shoulders, that of leading the church - and, so the dogma goes, the unheeding world. And though everyone loved and respected GBH, the man we all came to conference to hear was his long-time first counselor (and not-so secret heir apparent) Thomas S. Monson. 

Isn’t it odd that the church is so obsessed with initials? When I saw the obituary in the New York Times, I couldn’t help but catch on the liberal use of the monikers “Thomas Monson” and “Mr. Monson.” To the mormon ear, TMB and apostate alike, anything other that the full name pf the leadership with initials intact strikes the ear as rhythmically gauche.  “Thomas S. Monson.” Regardless, that’s where I first saw the announcement of Monson’s death. I remembered that I was a senior in high school when Monson succeeded Hinckley. I remember thinking vaguely (already emotionally and mentally done with the church): well, maybe he’ll make some changes for the better, be the more liberal leader so many in the church seemed to want - someone to appeal to the youth and the nostalgia of the old. Clearly, this didn’t happen. 

As a kid, I used to perk up in conference when Monson would get up to speak. In retrospect this had less to do with a personal inclination to him, and all to do with feeling I was supposed to find him charming and witty and folksy. Everyone else did. Was I the odd kid out for thinking that, outside of his practiced, soporific cadences and penchant for long, almost rambling stories with little more moral merit than a Grimm fairy tale, Monson was kind of boring? Everyone adored him. He’s had a cult following among the rank and file membership for as long as I can remember. Obviously, I can’t prove it,  but I wouldn’t be surprised if his skill with crowds propelled him up into the leadership faster than some of his older colleagues. 

The LDS church is nothing if not obsessed with its public image. In the latter days, Zion has managed quite the extraordinary PR reversal - a titanic effort, by any standard - of totally reinventing itself on the American, and the world, stage. The early days of the church saw it’s rise from upstart Great Awakening religious movement, to trouble-making western expansionists in Missouri, to a full-out anti-government rebellious theocratic king-state during the Brigham Young years. And finally, in the last half of the 20th century, the leadership completed in the turn into the camera-friendly, positive, smiling, all-American, red-blooded, conservative, squeaky-clean institution we know today. And who better to lead that brand at the top of the 21st century than the most positive, squeaky-clean man around? 

That very image - Monson’s down-home charm and grandfatherly demeanor - helped to sell the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to an increasingly turbulent world. ‘They may be some odd fuckers, but if they’re leader’s so nice, how bad can they really be?’

How bad can they really be. The smile hides the lie. Without mucking around in statistics, anyone with an internet connection can find the facts about Monson’s accomplishments as president. Youth suicides. Draining membership (hidden by inflated baptismal numbers not accounting for retention). Youth leaving the church en masse. Excessive and overwhelming amounts of debt and pornography in Utah. And, among the worst, the upholding of the condemnations of women and non-heterosexuals within the church. His tenure saw the Mormon and Gay movement - the normalization of sacrificing one’s own identity in favor of god’s supposed favor. This is Monson’s true legacy: a trail of rot and hypocrisy. The church is falling apart. It’s history heavily amended, it’s holy book a work of fiction, its policies outdated and anti-humanitarian. And the internet is killing it. The bleeding has begun, and Monson could not - nor can any of his successors - staunch the tide. 

My family was distraught at the announcement of Monson’s death. I know plenty of people who engaged in public mourning for the man, their beloved fallen leader. I for one am happy to see Monson die. He was a man out of his time. The old must be swept away, though in mormonism the old is most often replaced with the old. The most senior apostle takes Monson’s place. According to the understood codes, Russell M. Nelson will be the next president of the church. He stands to be, if anything, worse. Older, if anything, more conservative. What can he possibly hope to bring to this failing institution? If the train-wreck is coming, I’m sure as hell going to get a good seat. 

Good riddance, Thomas S. Monson. The world is better off without you. 

[movedto-dazaipositive]

what do I say? started on the parseposse, ended up here. probably gonna have a p2 if my adhd allows. sad as fuck

based on this post. I didn’t want to add my sad train wreck fic to the original. I’m assuming that the events of that headcanon go on to happen. as, they’re in the same universe.

warnings: temporary major character death as in Jack ODs but he lives

Kent grew up poor. they aren’t like, dirt poor, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to play hockey, but he and his mom are pretty strapped for cash

they have a house but his mom counts the bills every night and sometimes he can hear her crying through the walls.

but his skates were bought before his dad fucked off, and he’s been playing hockey as long as he can remember, and his mom does her best to keep him playing

and Kent doesn’t really know what it’s like to have a ton of parental support because his mom works three jobs to keep the afloat. she’s never home

and Kent is good at hockey, okay? he’s so good. but being too good at hockey and also being small is Bad, because he gets bullied. he gets called slurs and there’s one time where one of his teammates almost breaks Kent’s wrist, except that their coach walked into the locker room at that moment. Kent’s so scared by this he doesn’t sleep for a week

and Kent plays hard because he can’t let his mom down, and because it’s just the two of them. and he studies hard too, because what if he doesn’t get drafted? he needs to be able to work.

(note that my Hockey knowledge is sketchy af so correct me if I’m wrong)

and then he’s 15, at the Q, and he meets Jack for the first time.

jack’s parents, Kent learns, come to all his games. his dad is Bad Bob, and his mom is Alicia Zimmermann, and they still find the time to cheer their son on.

and when Kent finds out he can’t breathe for a second, because his mom has never had the time to come to his games. she was too busy making sure he was able to play.

and Kent and Jack are best friends by this point, because they get each other like no one else does.

so Kent hears first hand about how jack’s parents don’t really understand him, and how they nag him too much, that it’s so fucking hard to be Bad Bob’s son, and Kent hears this and he thinks, My dad walked out on my mom when I was eight

and Kent also sees how hard Bob and Alicia are trying to connect with Jack, support him and be there for him, and he can’t help but hate Jack for it.

because Jack has money and parents that love him and he still finds some way to be anxious

and one time Kent tells Jack that he grew up without a dad, and Jack says, Lucky you

and Kent still tries to be friends with Jack because Jack is the only one that gets what this game means to Kent. gets just how high the stakes are. because they’ll stay up late going over tape and drawing out plays on paper and get up before dawn the next day to put that into practice. no one else will do that with them

and he tries to be friends with Jack because he knows what it’s like to not have friends and he can tell that Jack does too, and maybe they can make things better for each other

but this isn’t about Jack and Kent. this is about Kent and Bob and Alicia

Alicia notices they way Kent looks at the Zimmermann family photos. at chubby eight y/o Jack and the shots from their summer in France. the wistfulness in his eyes.

she asks him about his mom one evening when Bob and Jack are out fishing and Kent doesn’t mean to cry but he does. he cries because he’s worried for her, for both of them. and because he misses her and can’t remember a time when he really had her

Alicia hugs Kent and makes him hot chocolate and strokes his hair and listens. not even Jack does that. and by the time Jack and Bob come back in, Kent is laughing, sitting on the counter and helping Alicia with dinner

he’s in the perfect position to see jack’s face when Jack spots Kent and Alicia. Jack frowns with half his face–his mouth doesn’t change but his eyes harden and his eyebrows draw in and then jack’s stomping up the stairs

he doesn’t talk to anyone all through dinner, except once to correct his dad on a hockey statistic. Kent doesn’t get why he’s so angry.

later, when he and Kent are getting ready for bed, Kent asks him. and Jack accuses him of sucking up to his mom

Jack hates volunteering at the pet shelter. but Kent will accompany Alicia. and Kent has opinions on pop music and he can talk about movies that aren’t any sports or action, and Jack hates it.

Jack can’t help but feel like Kent is the son his parents wish he was. charming and friendly and helpful

it’s the same with Bob; Kent likes to talk about racing cars. Kent likes mad magazine and prefers the crossword to the sudoku. Kent will not go golfing, and he hates fishing, but that doesn’t stop him from coming with Bob and Jack and asking stupid questions in a curious voice and saying and doing dumb shit that makes Bob laugh

and Jack hates it. Jack punishes Kent with silence and teeth in the kisses and making Kent skate suicides because "he needs the practice" until he vomits.

he doesn’t get why it’s so necessary to Kent. he doesn’t get why Kent sometimes picks jack’s parents over Jack. and Jack can’t really think about it for too long, because all he knows is that it feels like Kent is taking his place and doing all the things he’s supposed to do better than Jack ever can.

in this au, Jack sees the results of the draft before the pills. and it’s the last straw. the draft, Jack decides, is the last thing Kent takes from him. after that, there won’t be anything left

and Jack is drinking anyway, and there are the pills, and by the time Kent comes back up looking for Jack,

Jack is on the bathroom floor, choking on anxiety meds

listen there will, most likely, be a part 2. the posse is sure to kick my ass into gear at some point or the other.

[sadpoetsclub]

I’ve never been at peace and I don’t see it in my future. I’m stuck in love (?) with someone who knows all my failings and blames me for them. Torn down, down. Falling and failing and not helping me to build.

I’m not at peace and I miss you. (What an understatement.) Our worn and strained conversations just for the sake of talking punch the back of my sternum with every empty message. I had to stop; I’m sorry.

I’m not at peace and sometimes it’s two am and I had statistics homework due at twelve but I’m hungrily searching for your crypts to make the pain under my ribs more tangible. Numbers don’t mean fuck to me. Words on the other hand..

I’ll never be at peace knowing that we found the chink in Time. How can two people be so doomed? Such hot intensity between my overgrowns eyebrows and clammy breast. What a shame we will never own it, right?Because when I think of my future without the wrecking crane in it, I don’t see anyone in my bed. I’ve held a half dozen in the hot place but never you.

I’m not at peace because it’s way too early this Tuesday morning and I can’t hear the birds sing like the train. - s.w

[filmnovelizations]

Rocky IV

Rocky was impervious to it all. He and Drago were toe-to-toe, silently assaulting each other with psychological weapons. If looks could kill...

This book is bad. I’ve never been terribly familiar with the Rocky movies. I watched Rocky IV for the first time right before I started reading this masterpiece. The film is a somewhat baffling mess, and some of that mess is weirdly fixed by this book. There are so many minor and major differences between the book and film, it’s hard to believe Sylvester Stallone wrote them both. On the other hand, I haven’t found evidence of a ghost writer, so why not?

So, having finally watched the film, the first thing I wanted from the book was any small attempt to make sense of the fucking robot. There is none.

A robot walked through the door. It was about five feet tall and rolled on wheels. In its outstretched arms it held the flaming birthday cake. A perpetual “Have a nice day” smile was painted around the microphone box on its face. A pink ribbon was tied decoratively around its square head.

So, the description is a little different from the actual robot, but that’s the least of my concerns. They give the pathetic, lonely, alcoholic Paulie a robot as a joke because he doesn’t have any friends. At first he’s annoyed, then he uses the skills he must have learned at the slaughterhouse to reprogram the robot to talk with a breathy female voice while on a constant mission to supply him beer. In Las Vegas, he’s sad he didn’t bring the robot. After he loses all his money on slot machines and blackjack, he talks to a prostitute but laments losing all his money gambling, and he’s sad he didn’t bring the fucking robot. You can just go ahead and assume he’s jamming his dick into some part of that robot. 

While Paulie is losing all his prostitute money gambling, Stallone supplies a perfect example of the kind of bad writing that loads up this short book.

A chair opened up at the table. Paulie decided that a change of games would help his luck. He sat down and bought twenty dollars’ worth of chips. If you’re gonna do it, might as well splurge. He put a two-dollar chip in front of him. The dealer drew the cards out of the shoe. Paulie got a ten and a king.

What table? Yes, I suppose a change of games would at least make a more interesting time than cheap slot machines. Is twenty dollars splurging? How broke is Paulie? Wait, how does he make money? If you’re gonna do it, you might as well cliche. A two dollar bet is not a splurge. Oh, it’s a blackjack game. You could have called it a blackjack table in the first sentence instead of “the table.” This is a major casino in Las Vegas, not an illegal casino in the basement of a bar.

And so Sylvester Stallone’s writing is filled with paragraphs like this. Sometimes pronouns are not clearly defined, because they’ll switch who they refer to or they just won’t clearly refer to anyone. There are so many cliches I should have kept count.

A few hookers loitered in front of the bar, but Rocky didn’t recognize any of them.

So, after the robot nonsense, the next most obvious thing I wanted from this book was the book version of the montage. This film is notorious for its use of montage. I timed the montages. There are four montages in the film. After fighting with Adrian, Rocky has a driving montage. There are two separate montages when Rocky is training in Russia. And then there’s the montage to skip twelve rounds of boxing in the Rocky-Drago fight. I think people might think of the James Brown music video in their estimation that this movie is overloaded with montage, but it’s really not a montage. It’s a music video.

Anyway, the four official montages amount to fifteen minutes and seventeen seconds. The end credits roll at eighty-four minutes. If you take out or just severely reduce the length of the montages, the movie is just less than seventy minutes long. If you want to argue that the James Brown music video counts because it is unnecessarily inflating the film’s runtime the same as the montages, go ahead and cut off another two minutes and forty seconds. Either way, this film is short enough without discarding fifteen-eighteen minutes. In the book, James Brown is absent. Apollo Creed’s entrance is a normal paragraph.

Suddenly the band started playing again. It was a lively, raucous tune. A side door to the ballroom opened and a troupe of scantily dressed chorus girls holding small American flags entered. They were followed by Apollo with Rocky at his side. Behind them were Duke and Paulie. Apollo was dressed as Uncle Sam in a red, white, and blue suit complete with a top hat. The ballroom thundered with applause. Well-wishers tried to swamp the group as they made their way to the ring, but the polite, yet firm security men kept them at bay. Their job was made harder by Apollo. He kept reaching out to shake hands. When he reached the bandstand he jumped up and down in time to the music. The applause became so loud that the band itself was drowned out. Rocky shook his head in wonder. Who says you can’t go home again? Apollo was doing it.

After that, the driving montage is completely replaced with actual story. Rocky doesn’t drive around thinking about the shit that happened in the first three films. He tries to convince the United Boxing Federation to allow him to fight Drago, and forfeits his title when they refuse. Paulie wrecks Rocky’s car. The mayor of Philadelphia pays to restores Goldmill’s Gym so Rocky can train somewhere familiar. Two officials from the State Department try to convince Rocky to cancel the fight. They have statistics that prove he can’t win. Shitty Paulie tries to convince Rocky to hit Adrian regularly so she’ll learn some respect. It’s not all good story, but it’s so much better than the driving montage.

The only montage that really makes it into the book in a way that feels like a montage is the training-in-Russia montage. The film breaks it into two by having a short scene when Adrian joins him. The montage just eats up most of the penultimate chapter and it looks like this:

This is the book version of a montage. Even with Stallone’s basic writing, it works.

Rocky turned into the camera’s glare. “Get that light off him!” Duke grabbed the man by the belt and jerked him away from Rocky and Apollo. Rocky cradled Apollo’s head in his arms. “Hold on. You can do it. I know you can. Just hold on.” But Apollo let loose and flowed into legend.

I am still so very confused by some of the differences between the film and the novel. The first thing I need to address is a bit tricky. In the film, which as I said rolls credits at about 84 minutes, Apollo Creed dies at about 32 minutes. The novel is 156 pages long, and Apollo dies on page 101. This means that 2/3 of the story in the novel is contained in the first 1/3 of the film. This would almost explain the abundance of montage in the remainder of the film if it weren’t for all the story Stallone left out of the film but still put in that part of the novel. The novel tells a far more even story and I would sincerely like to know what went wrong when Stallone filmed the damn thing. He clearly thought about the gaps in the story and filled them in with the novel. Even accounting for the montages after Apollo’s death, how did he get more runtime out of the last 1/3 of the novel with objectively less story?

Would you like to know more about Ivan Drago? It’s in the book. Read up on his background and how he started boxing. However, there’s also something in the book that would probably have him in jail. In the film, Apollo’s death doesn’t look like deliberate murder. When the fight is technically over, Drago stops punching and starts reciting the English he’s been told to recite. It’s sort of chaos. The book, however...

Rocky grabbed the towel and quickly threw it in the ring. Drago was still punching. Apollo rocked savagely with each blow. It was amazing that he could still stand. “The ex-champion is out on his feet. He’s being pounded without mercy. Balboa has just thrown in the towel!” White yelled gratefully. As soon as he saw the towel the referee stepped in and tried to separate the fighters. Drago paused again to look at his corner. Rimsky nodded grimly. Drago pushed the referee aside and delivered a final blow that could be heard over the din of the crowd.

Murderer. The fight is over and he pauses to look at his handler before punching Apollo one last time. It would be hard to argue that Drago wasn’t ordered to kill Apollo, what with all the cameras around. The rest of the story would be quite different then.

I want to address one last thing that I think gets lost in the James Brown and montages and Ivan Drago, and that is Rocky Jr. Unlike Die Hard, no one thinks of this film as a Christmas movie. You should add it to your Christmas viewing, honestly. The final fight takes place on Christmas Day. That’s enough. But what about Rocky Jr.? Think about the story from his perspective. For his entire life, Apollo was Rocky’s best friend. He probably called him Uncle. He watched Uncle Apollo get murdered. Then his dad is going to Russia to train to fight the same person that murdered Uncle Apollo. And that fight is going to happen on Christmas Day. Then his mom left to join his dad in Russia. Who’s taking care of him? It’s the housekeeper you barely see in the movie, not that either film or novel mentions it. Stallone didn’t think to address the fact that Rocky and Adrian abandon Rocky Jr. at Christmas. In the film, you see a few shots of him watching the fight with a couple friends and Paulie’s robot. The novel at least has the housekeeper instead of the robot. This is, by far, my favorite Christmas story now. Who are the friends that watch the fight with Rocky Jr.? How did that get set up? “Hey, I know it’s Christmas and your parents probably want to spend it with you but do you want to come over and maybe watch my dad get murdered by a 7 foot tall Russian?” In the novel, Rocky doesn’t even say “merry Christmas” to Rocky Jr. at the end of his speech.

Rocky Junior couldn’t take his eyes off the television set. Was this really happening to his dad? Was this what boxing was about? It was horrible. He wanted it to end. He wanted his mother and father home. “Your dad’s getting smashed,” a friend said quietly. Rocky Junior blinked, but the picture didn’t go away. It was real, not a nightmare.

Yeah. This book is bad and you should absolutely read it.

Also, Adrian is pregnant in the book, and Rocky tells Paulie this right after Paulie tells him to hit her to teach her respect. Her pregnancy is entirely forgotten after that though, and it is not an issue when she travels to Russia to watch her husband possibly get murdered. It just isn’t mentioned again. Just something to think about. What a Christmas story. Buy paintings so I can buy more paint to paint more paintings